Announcements 




Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.



The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling


resist (Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


Between The Lines on Stitcher

stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

inequality
"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Between The Lines Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Podcasts Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts:  direct  or  via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

RSS feed  twitter  facebook

donate  Learn how to support our efforts!

Report: Palestinians Suffer Egregious Discrimination Under Israeli Control

Real Audio  Real Audio  podcast  MP3

Interview with Bill Van Esveld, Middle East researcher with Human Rights Watch based in Jerusalem, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

palestinian Human Rights Watch has just released a new report titled, "Separate and Unequal: Israel's Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," which documents specific and egregious discrimination against Palestinian residents of "Area C" of the West Bank, that is, the area exclusively controlled by Israel, not the Palestinian Authority.

Material for the report was collected through interviews with Palestinians in several villages with Israeli settlers in the West Bank and from two leaked Israeli government reports documenting conditions in both the settlements -- which are considered illegal under international law -- and settlement outposts, which are considered illegal, even by Israel. Among other things, the report documents the scarcity of water in Palestinian communities, while nearby settlements have swimming pools -- and Palestinian children studying by candlelight as nearby Israeli settlements light up the night with electricity from the grid.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Bill Van Esveld, a Middle East researcher with Human Rights Watch, based in Jerusalem and the author of the "Separate and Unequal" report. Speaking by phone from Israel, he describes the conditions investigated and explains some Human Rights Watch proposals for easing discrimination.

BILL VAN ESVELD: What we found was pretty striking. In one case, in the northern Jordan Valley, which is up in the northeast part of the West Bank, there is a Palestinian village that used to be a farming community, and when Israel occupied the area, drilled some wells and set up some civilian settlements that are mostly agricultural. And the new wells drilled by Israel to service those agricultural settlements basically dried out the Palestinian wells. Now the Palestinians have lost about half the agricultural land they used to be able to cultivate, while the Israeli settlements...there's a swimming pool in one of them that also operates a little guesthouse for tourists, and they're exporting a lot of agricultural crops to European and other markets. Meanwhile Palestinians are going into debt or into poverty and in some cases have had to move out of that town to other areas of the West Bank in hopes of being able to make a living.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Is that part of the intent, to remove Palestinians from more land in the West Bank?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Well, we don't have any sort of smoking gun documents that would demonstrate an Israeli intent to empty Area C of Palestinians, so there's not evidence to back up such a claim. What there is evidence of is just that Palestinians are leaving. In many cases they have left communities in Area C because, they told us, it's just impossible to continue living there. Many of them are not connected to the water network, or if they are connected, they turn on their tap and often nothing comes out. Or, in light of that, they have to buy water in water tankers that are driven along roads behind tractors...even the water tankers can be confiscated if they're not properly permitted. So people have been effectively forced to leave their homes.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And one of the rationales that Israelis use for continuing to build settlements is to allow for what they call "natural increase," i.e., to allow families to expand their homes as their families expand, right?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Right. Well, this is an irony. There actually is a building freeze going on in the West Bank right now, but it's not being imposed against settlers; it's being imposed against Palestinians living in Area C. And it's so severe that in fact there is no natural growth being allowed in Palestinian communities. That's the sort of discrimination we've found, and it spans a lot of areas of everyday life that don't seem to have any rational benefit to Israeli security or even the welfare of settlers living nearby. It seems unnecessarily harsh and punitive.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Bill Van Esveld, Human Rights Watch has noted Israel's legitimate security concerns, and Israel justifies these restrictions in the West Bank on that basis, right?

BILL VAN ESVELD: We take that into account, but no security argument can conceivably explain refusing to allow someone to build a water tank or a house or a medical clinic or a school. To claim that that's a security concern seems absurd. In other cases, there is a security argument, such as preventing people moving on roads or erecting roadblocks or checkpoints. But those security limitations and freedom of movement limitations have been imposed in a really blanket fashion that basically targets all Palestinians moving on those roads as if they were security threats -- old women, old men, babies, the lot of them. And that is just treating an entire population as if every one of them is a security threat, based on nothing but their ethnicity or national origin. You can limit people's freedom of movement, but you have to do so on a tailored and specific basis; you can't just say that everyone who happens to look a certain way is a threat and therefore we can prevent them from moving around. Meanwhile, of course, settlers have special bypass roads that are built for them while Palestinians are prevented from paving their roads and have to navigate numerous roadblocks and checkpoints.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Your report says, "Donor countries must avoid complicity in violations of international law caused by the settlements," in other words, where settlements are draining resources, and it says the European Union should identify cases where discrimination against Palestinians contributed to the production of goods that are then sent to the EU and other places. It seems like that would cover all goods produced in the settlements.

BILL VAN ESVELD: Well, it could. Basically we made that recommendation because we only examined in detail a few specific cases, so we don't have the facts to make an argument that all businesses that are taking part in settlements are someway directly to contributing to discrimination against Palestinians, but what we're saying is there's a lot of evidence out there that that might be the case, and that businesses often claim to have their own human rights or ethical standards; the UN has put out a framework for how businesses should behave to take human rights concerns into account. So what we're saying is that businesses need to be on notice. If you're a business and you have activities in settlements, you need to be on notice that there's a lot of severe discrimination going on there, and you need to carefully and independently review your activities to make sure you're not complicit in it. And if you are, you have to take the appropriate steps to mitigate and prevent that contribution to violations of human rights, and if the only way to do that is to stop your operations there, then you need to do so.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And I wonder if and how your report could be related to the BDS -- Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- movement?

BILL VAN ESVELD: The BDS movement, you know, it means different things to different people, and I think one of the main ways I would characterize it is it appeals directly to consumers. And our report does not do that. Basically we are trying to target decision-makers themselves. So we are asking businesses, for example, to examine their own activities. We're not calling on people to boycott the businesses or divest from the businesses; we're saying the businesses have the primary responsibility first, to figure out what they're doing. It's not good enough to turn a blind eye and say, "Oh, well, we weren't aware there were any problems there."

BETWEEN THE LINES: What, if anything, has been the Israeli response to your report?

BILL VAN ESVELD: We've had informal meetings with a number of Israeli officials who were, to my pleasant surprise, quite supportive of the report's findings and concerned by them, but those people are not in the prime minister's office. The official response has been quite harsh. Unfortunately, that's fairly predictable, but we hope that the Israeli government will see this report as constructive criticism. The report is basically calling on Israel to abide by its obligations under the Geneva Conventions to withdraw its settlers and dismantle the settlements, but that may take awhile, but what it could immediately and should immediately do is stop discriminatory policies that are harming Palestinians.

To read the report online, visit the Human Rights Watch's website at hrw.org or call Human Rights Watch at (212) 290-4700.

Related links: